Gospel (63 page)

Lunch followed and for the first time Lucy tired of the inevitable bipolar choice of most Greek lunch specials: souvlaki or moussaka. What was that ever-rotating convex slab of meat anyway, exposed for months at a time to leaded European auto exhaust and flies? Certainly it wasn't one little lamb, undifferentiated and humongous … it must be lots of lambs, all ground up and reconstituted. Lucy had hoped to rely on salads to break up the culinary monotony, but the last sumptuous Greek salad in Athens was immersed in olive oil, and this had produced diarrhea, as one particularly long visit to the hole-in-the-ground Mediterranean toilet reconfirmed.

“The old diarrhea again, Luce?” said O'Hanrahan upon her return, roseate with an absorbed bottle of retsina. He waved the waiter away with the change from lunch.

“No, I liked squatting over that reeking hole in the floor so much I thought I'd stay for a while.”

“Ah,” intoned O'Hanrahan as they walked from the café, “'twas Diarrhea herself that brought great Hercules low and bade him to his death. ‘This is the
end,
' he said—”

“That's lame, old man. I did Classics as an undergrad,” Lucy additionally informed him, getting into the car as Stavros held the door, “so there's no excuse for this second-rate material. And furthermore, I'd appreciate not having my diarrhea discussed publicly.”

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “Stavros loves you for who you are, don't you, Stavros?”

Stavros merely repeated the Greek word “diarrhea,” unchanged through the centuries.

“Oh, please.”

After Thessaloniki came the worst of the roads, the winding, badly engineered two-lane road to Ouranopolis, through the mountains of Chalkidiki. Accompanying the lurching right and left was the stopping and starting as Stavros came upon too quickly the back of a diesel smog–spewing truck moving 25 m.p.h. or a farmer and donkey cart blocking the road. Up, down, right, left, stop, start … Lucy's stomach churned with indigestion on the nauseating curves, and she at last demanded a rest break.

This garnered O'Hanrahan's opposition, though once they had stopped in a little village called Paleochori it allowed O'Hanrahan a chance to purchase more retsina, bottled in clear long-necks for easy drinking. Slightly recovered, Lucy got back in the car and Stavros drove on while O'Hanrahan swigged from the retsina as he talked.

“Yeah, they hate us,” he was saying to Lucy, referring to Orthodox hatred of Roman Catholics, “and I'd hate us too if I were they.” He turned to Stavros, asking in Greek, “What do you think of Roman Catholics, Stavros?”

He said something, as if about to spit.

“The enmity of the East,” pronounced O'Hanrahan.

“Are they still sore over the
filioque
business?” asked Lucy, remembering Church History 102. In 451 the Council of Chalcedon, that fount of 1600 years of Christian bickering, confirmed that Christians would believe
in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father,
etc. But eventually some prelates in Charlemagne's kingdom preferred the phrase
who proceeds from the Father and the Son, “filioque”
in Latin. The phrase was inserted in the Roman version of the Creed, despite the disapproval of centuries of popes, despite Rome's oaths to abide by the councils of the earlier, purer church, and despite that perpetual inconvenience for Rome, the Holy Scriptures: Jesus spoke of the Spirit,
who proceeds from the Father
in
John
15:26.

(Nonetheless, Roman Catholics felt justified in branding the patriarchs of the East heretics, laying a bull of excommunication upon the altar in Constantinople's Hagia Sophia in 1054. The case was put forward by one of the great morons of Catholic history, Cardinal Humbert, who accused the East of
deleting
the phrase. Excommunications and anathemae flew back and forth and, much to Our disappointment, 900 years of hostility and schism ensued.)

“1054,” said O'Hanrahan, “the same year as the Crab Nebula Nova, which lit the sky as a second sun, the heavens themselves in schism.”

“Nice touch,” noted Lucy. “Didn't Rome and the East try to patch things up?”

“Yes, but always with disastrous consequences, with Rome sending its stubbornest, stupidest men to the bargaining tables. It didn't matter, though, because Western behavior during the Crusades would make the schism complete.”

O'Hanrahan swilled the last of the retsina and undid his seatbelt to better make room for his stomach, which he rested folded hands upon.

“It's significant,” he narrated, “that in all these Crusades against the Moslem infidel, only two great cities were sacked and looted, and they were Christian: Constantinople and Alexandria. The Templars and Hospitalers cut all kinds of deals with the Moslems—Masonic secret orders practice bastardized Islamic rites to this day. And Mohammed, in any event, got on with Christians; some 12,000 Christians fought with him in his first great battle. If you paid the Moslems their tribute, like to the Caesars of old, they left other Children of the Book alone. No, the true target of the Crusades came to be the wealth of the East.”

Lucy leaned forward during the lull. “Surely you're not pausing on the brink of atrocities, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

“Forgive my after-lunch laziness,” he said, sitting up straight: “On the First Crusade in 1095, would it surprise you to know that Romans, drunk and marauding, stormed Cappadocia, raped the women, killed the men, and then roasted the town's children on a spit for a banquet? In Caesarea, the European mob of homeless and destitute who came for plunder killed all the Moslems in their mosque, wiped out the Jews and all the Arab Christians they could lay their hands on, taking their property. Speaking of Jews, the Holy Roman Empire's Crusaders celebrated leaving Germany by the public slaughter of a thousand Jews, so they were well in practice by the time they got to the Holy Lands. Upon taking Jerusalem for the one and only time, the Christians rounded up the Jews, put them in a synagogue and burned it down with all inside. Mordechai can give chapter and verse on all the Jewish massacres.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “no doubt.”

O'Hanrahan rambled, amassing the grisly highlights of the Crusades, the hypocrisy, the abject holocausts in Rome's name … Lucy observed her mentor, holding forth as if reading from a script, as if lecturing before an appreciative audience, a packed hall of students. She briefly regretted never having seen Patrick O'Hanhrahan in his prime teaching Church History back at the University. Lucy thought how thoroughly he
owned
the dark and shameful past, how tightly he held it to himself; not unlike a long-suffering son recounting his ne'er-do-well father's waywardness: do you see, God, what I have to remember and endure in order to love You?

“… throughout France and Germany children would announce their intention to go to Jerusalem and parents would send their unwanted offspring after the knights, roaming in mobs as large as 20,000. The Pied Piper myths stem from this period; the original tale was of unwanted, unfed children being led away, not rats.

(Rats, alas, fared better then. These mobs never reached Jerusalem; they were sold into slavery in North Africa, sold to the child-brothels of Sardinia.)

“One also thinks of 1204 and the Sack of Constantinople by Roman forces. Three days of pillage were allowed, the jewels and gold of Byzantium began their slow trip to Venice—and not an Orthodox nun was allowed to go unraped for the glory of the pope. The relics were looted, including the Hand of John the Baptist, which is yet on display in Suleiman the Magnificent's palace in Istanbul. A prostitute was found and put upon the Patriarch's throne in the Hagia Sophia—”

“Excuse me, Dr. O'Hanrahan, but are there any episcopal thrones in the Mediterranean world that have
not
been occupied by prostitutes?”

“Now
there
is a thesis worthy of your time and attention, Miss Dantan. In any event the Hand was brought out and the prostitute upon the Patriarch's throne, shall we say, brought herself to pleasure with this most precious relic…”

(Patrick would fixate upon something like that.)

“The Baptist had to wait 1200 years for a feel, but if you hang around long enough, you see what can happen.”

(Cover your ears, Lucy.)

“Well, to this day, the Sack is remembered,” O'Hanrahan said sadly, “and after it no hope of concord was possible. Innocent II, on hearing that a Latin patriarch had been installed in Constantinople, declared the orgy of blood a
magnificat mirabilis,
a magnificent miracle, and announced that all the Crusaders were granted an indulgence that would permit them to go straight to heaven.”

(The odd sense of outrage the Christian world has for how the Islamic world feels about it almost touches Us in its naiveté. If We have observed anything, it is that most crimes have a way of visiting themselves upon the countries who commit them; it is in this spirit that Moses wrote that sins of fathers are visited upon their children. If Islamic
jihad
and terrorism and anti-Western sentiment trouble the West, perhaps it should refer to its own 400 years of Christian state terrorism.)

“The greatest library of the Islamic world,” mourned O'Hanrahan, “far superior to any pile of claptrap possessed in Europe, was in Tripoli, the Banu-Ammar. It was burned by Christian Crusaders in 1109. Christians are the world's great philistines; they've always had a Jesse Helms streak. The best library ever assembled on earth was the Great Library at Alexandria, which puritanical Christians burned in 391, because there were possibly heretical and obscene works within it. Christian fanatics closed the School of Athens in 529, banning all universities and secular education. During Innocent III's Albigensian Crusade, the mere possession of a Bible in the home, which only priests were supposed to own, caused thousands to be burned at the stake.”

(Woe to those who would spread ignorance!)

“Well,” said Lucy, falling back in her seat. “I suppose it will take more than a rosary or two to make up for all that.”

“I can tell,” said the professor, “you're racked with guilt.”

“Didn't the Greeks do anything bad?”

“Oh, tons. They pounce upon the West for heresy and updating conciliar creeds, but they did the same in 451 at Chalcedon, condemning monophysitism and losing the Copts, the Armenians, the Ethiopians, and the Syrians, who, technically, are more orthodox than the Greeks are. As for scheming and conniving, no sack or Hunnish invasion of Rome was ever as devastating as Byzantium's centuries-long plotting against Rome during the Dark Ages, all for the sake of a little real estate in southern Italy. Pope Silverius was tortured and killed by the bloodthirsty Justinian and Theodora…”

Lucy smiled to hear of Teddie's namesake.

“There was a roundup of Latin-rite Christians in Constantinople in 11-something or other…”

(1187.)

“Whom they massacred, Crusader-style. Plus, the Greek Orthodox treated their Arab-Christian brethren horribly, cheating them in war after war, treaty after treaty. If it hadn't been for all the bickering over personhood and substance, the naturally monotheistic Arab world might have remained Christian instead of being ripe for conversion to Islam. I have read intelligent men mystified, stymied by the spread of Islam, its speed and its thoroughness. Hell, if you had to contend with the Byzantine Emperor, you'd have converted too! The arrogance of Byzantium. One thinks of poor schmoes like Father Avvakum.”

(Avvakum and the Patriarch Nikon argued over a theological point in the mid-1600s. Nikon had him exiled for ten years, but he didn't soften. Then he had him imprisoned for twenty-two years, moving him to a dank, lightless, underground cell. Avvakum still didn't agree with him. So the Patriarch burned him at the stake. At issue? Whether to make the sign of the Cross with two or three fingers.)

“But you like being Orthodox, don't you, Stavros?” asked O'Hanrahan.

“
Neh,
” he said, reaching under his T-shirt and bringing his pendant Greek Cross to his lips in reverence.

Lucy tried to get a clarification on whether
Neh
meant
no.

The professor: “
Neh
means yes, and
ohi
means no.”

“‘Nah' is yes and ‘okay' is no?”

“That's right.”

Lucy shook her head. “Of course, it should be that way. It's a foreign country.”

A few more lurches of the narrow road and they came to a small mountain pass: on their left as well as far to the right was the Aegean, and in between rose a spine of mountains, the Athos Peninsula. The high ridge appeared heavily wooded and mysterious in the haze, and Lucy felt a small defeat in knowing its treasures were closed to her. Damn patriarchs.

“No women at all,” she said, as if to herself.

“Nope,” said O'Hanrahan. “Not even female animals,” he reminded her. “That's why there's haze, because there are trees and plants. And there are plants and trees because there's no grazing. Sheep herds, goat herds—grazing has turned Greece into a rocky, barren place. In front of us, Miss Dantan, you see Greece as the ancients saw it, where Chloris fled from Zephyr. A tropical garden—”

“I don't want to hear about it.”

“Jealous?”

It went without saying. Lucy, however, speculated: “I bet some woman's done it. Snuck onto the place.”

O'Hanrahan answered, “I doubt any have gotten inside the monasteries.”

(Want to bet?)

O'Hanrahan: “A Byzantine princess tried unsuccessfully.”

(Empress Mara, wife of the conquering Sultan Murat, came to present the monasteries with money as well as the recovered relics of the Gifts of the Magi. As she stepped off the dock, there's the old story that the Virgin appeared to her and said it was her garden alone. She lost her nerve was what happened.)